I'm Flor Lichtenen and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the podcast, from wingtints to toenails, how evolutionary success is in the details.

We found that the answer was very complicated more than we thought.

If you are a moth, the answer was very complicated more than we thought.

If you are a moth trying to stay uneaten, there are competing strategies around camouflage.

Some moths try to blend in.

They're drab.

They go for earth tones.

Other moths take the opposite approach. They're bold and bright

with colors that send the message, don't eat me, I'm poison, I swear. But which one of these

winged wardrobes works better? Writing in the journal science, researchers report on a study that

involved placing about 15,000 fake paper moths in forests around the world to see what they could deduce about coloration.

Here to talk about it is study author Dr. Ileana Medina.

She's a senior lecturer in biosciences at the University of Melbourne.

Ileana, welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, Flora.

Very nice to be here.

We got to start in the methods today.

15,000 origami moths.

Please talk me through how you did it and why you did it.

Yes, so 15,000 moths could only have been done by lots and lots of people. So it was a very, very

big collaboration and tons of hours of work by many, many other researchers. And yeah,

...